Headlights(8)

I called it quits and applied for the transfer.

Case, marriage, family. I don’t know what I could possibly be doing here now. Maybe I’m still sleeping back in Salt Lake and this is a nightmare. Maybe none of it is happening at all.

Pete Noland in the chair, sobbing to Tillman and Garcia. Five years since the last murder, and almost four years since my parents died. And this thing somehow back twice in a week. The perpetrator escalating. Before, the closest together were a month apart.

Again, the infuriating question. The interminable and repeating, nauseating question.

Why?

“We scoured their computers and phones, these new ones, absolutely nothing, all the phones cut out, so no location data on movements. No shared page visits, no clubs or forums. Cyber’s monitoring Reddit and the chat rooms. They’ve noted it’s been quiet so far, aside from this one user. Posted something a few months back saying they knew the Dri—the killers were gonna come back. Has this stupid username, ‘Wizdumteller.’ We’re looking into it. Not sure if anyone told you, but not too long after you left we got word of a docuseries in the works and squashed it pretty quickly, but for a year or two there the internet was blowing up so much, we had to put a full team on handling it all.”

I was recognized in the first year in Utah and stopped going out other than for work for a long time after. “Has anyone been to the girlfriend’s house yet?” I ask. “The one Pete snuck out of?”

“No. Car’s still there though, far as I know.”

Pete isn’t crying anymore. He has leaned back in his chair and turned his face partway up to the ceiling. Shock. Brain shut down to static. Tillman still talking to him, moving his hands in an overstated I’m on your side kind of way. What a prick. Pete just staring up at the ceiling. Maybe beyond it.

“He’s lookin’ to God,” Jack says.

Last I checked, all the previous killers are sitting in jail cells still bewildered by the fact that this is now their life. Still unable to recover a single memory from the time in which they committed atrocities upon people they maintain even now are total strangers to them.

I don’t say anything. We both know what’s gonna happen to Pete Noland. We both know this kid’s life is over before it’s even begun. It’d be kinder to stick a gun in his hand and put him in front of enemy fire.

Jack closes the file.

We both know there’s no place for God in any of this.





4



It almost never rains in Colorado. Everyone here will tell you that. Over three hundred days of sun a year. They say it like a TV slogan they’re paid to repeat, as if the whole state were an insistent advertisement of itself. I sit in my car, in the night, rain falling hard. Jack’s gone home to his family. Home for dinner where people are waiting for him. He invited me, but I can’t do it.

I don’t remember walking from the office to the car, don’t remember half of today. I peel off my work jacket and reach behind me until I find the brown leather one I wear off duty. I shrug it on. Watch the raindrops fall in my headlights.

It’s getting dark early, mid-November somehow already. It was late in the day when Jack and I pulled up to the office, I don’t know how many hours ago. There are always at least a couple agents working, and sometimes, inside, it’s hard to tell what time it is. This case, being back, distorting the world, stretching it. It was like this before too. Hard, sometimes, for any of us to stay tied to reality.

Jack showing me sites on the map. All of it, too slow and too fast. Out of time and completely inevitable. The two new cases in blue, the eight old ones in red. Still, no discernible patterns. Ramona Lopez’s murder out by Adams City, the gas station attendant down by Littleton. All the others scattered. I don’t have to look at them. I’ve recited the places and names of the victims so many times I can do it in my sleep, often do hear them in my sleep. Though less and less in the last couple years.

My old desk upstairs, empty. Cleared off for me. The nameplate I’d thrown in the trash on my last day just sitting right there. Like they always knew I’d return.

Special Agent Daniel Stansfield.

Shadows drifting in the corners, watching me.

Everyone desperate for someone else to take this on. And of course it would be me. I’ve already borne the brunt of the backlash, I can take it. I should be the one to deal with it. The guy who’d been unstoppable for years, had once been the recipient of awards and special commendations and cracked nearly every case put in front of him. The guy who couldn’t solve this one, was responsible for all the lives lost.

The guy who is back.

I drop my forehead to the steering wheel.

I’m not working at that fucking desk. I’m not staying. I can’t believe I’m here at all.

The night, the dark.

My shining boy.

Pounding on the door.

I jump, reach for my pistol.

Not pounding. Knocking, tapping, on my window. On the car window in the rain.

I breathe, slow my heart, take in the figure blurred through the raindrops on the glass, knocking. The car is fogged up. It takes me a second to move.

I roll down the window. I know who it is before she bends down, droplets dripping from her hair, catching in her eyelashes, on her lips. It hits like a punch to the chest. Even now, I can barely breathe looking at her.